A mammoth 90 percent of American Christian leaders — from Catholics to evangelicals — believe in the reality of human-induced climate change, a new study has found.
However, these same leaders are typically silent in their beliefs and fail to share that understanding with their congregants, according to the study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Because of leadership’s silence on the matter, rank-and-file Christians think most of their leaders do not believe,” senior author Gregg Sparkman, an assistant professor at Boston College, said in a statement.
As a result, Sparkman explained, those same congregants “feel hesitant to even discuss climate change with their fellow churchgoers.”
Sparkman and author Stylianos Syropoulos, now an assistant professor at Arizona State University, drew their conclusions based on a survey of 1,600 Christian leaders across the country.
Of these leaders, they found that nearly 90 percent said they believed in anthropogenic climate change to at least some degree.
Some 60 percent of the leaders replied that humans play a major role, while 30 percent said they felt that people have had more minor impacts, according to the survey.
Breaking the data down further, the researchers observed that more than 80 percent of evangelical or fundamentalist Christian leaders believe that humans have contributed to climate change.
Nonetheless, the authors also found that about half of the respondents have never discussed this issue with their congregants — and that only a quarter have mentioned it more than once or twice.
A second survey included in the study showed that U.S. Christians broadly underestimate the prevalence of their leaders who believe in climate change. Although these participants guessed that about half of their leaders were climate-change deniers, only about 10 percent truly fell into that category, per the study.
In a third set of survey results, about half of 1,000 respondents were informed that 90 percent of Christian leaders believe in manmade climate change. That newfound awareness then increased their perception that other church members believe in or are opening to discussing this fraught issue.
As such, more respondents answered that taking climate action would be consistent with church values, while voting for politicians who oppose doing so is not, according to the findings.
“We find that informing Christians that the majority of their religious leaders believe in man-made climate change leads them to realize that climate action is in line with their morals, and voting for politicians who deny climate change may be at odds with their faith,” Sparkman said.
Noting that every year, droughts, fires, floods and other extreme weather events become more common, he stressed that 9 out of 10 Christian leaders already believe that humans have a role to play in these phenomena.
“If this truth gets out and they break their silence, it will help Christian Americans come to faith on this dire issue,” Sparkman added.
